The Man Who Saved The Everglades

Lefty politicians and left-leaning enviros have a natural inclination towards top-down bureaucratic solutions when it comes to solving environmental problems.

Sometimes, there is no practical alternative, but more often than not, it means throwing a lot of taxpayer dollars at a problem with little real progress to show for it. This is particularly true when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is involved.

Such has been the problem with the Everglades restoration effort. Restoring the River of Grass means much more than doing a good turn for roseate spoonbills and green tree frogs. The Everglades are a bearing wall for South Florida’s economy, supporting tourism, recreation, and commercial fishing.

The National Research Council’s 2008 report, Progress Toward Restoring the Everglades, noted that the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan initiated in 2000 “has made only scant progress toward achieving restoration goals and is mired in budgeting, planning, and procedural matters.”

Enter Florida Governor Charlie Crist.

To move things along, Crist quietly negotiated a willing-seller deal with U.S. Sugar last year for the state to buy out the company’s land and other assets for $1.75 billion.

The NRC report points out, “Successful Everglades restoration depends on the acquisition of particular sites and the protection of general areas within the ecosystem.” Crist’s bold deal will free up 180,000 critical acres that are currently being used to grow sugar cane.

On May 13, Crist won the blessing of the South Florida Water Management District for a down payment: a $536 million purchase of 73,000 acres. The deal includes a 10-year option to buy an additional 107,000 acres from U.S. Sugar. The land will be used to store and cleanse water flowing to the Everglades.

Fixing the Everglades is essentially a gigantic plumbing project to deliver clean water to the River of Grass at the right times and in the right places. Crist recognizes that gaining the participation of business is vital for making the project work.

Unlike too many well-meaning folks on the left, Governor Crist takes a pragmatic, business-like approach to environmental issues and sees the private sector as a valuable partner in the cause of good stewardship.

But no good deed goes unpunished. Crist’s environmental leadership, combined with his broad, bipartisan appeal, has put him in the crosshairs of faux conservative ideologues who have spent decades trashing the conservative tradition of stewardship and giving the issue away to Nancy Pelosi and other statists.

Crist’s candidacy to succeed retiring Senator Mel Martinez will no doubt mean more of the same from radicals who have lost touch with many of the underlying tenets of conservatism and the Grand Old Party’s long conservation legacy, but nonetheless feel qualified to impose their own rigid doctrinal purity on the party.

Crist’s conservation ethic has a conservative taproot, dating to the days of Edmund Burke. Framing the economy and nature as irreconcilable foes is both a disservice to the public and a grotesque distortion of true conservatism.

To put a green twist on a Benjamin Franklin aphorism, those who would give up the economy for the environment, or vice versa, in time will have neither.

Charlie Crist gets that.